Love and insomnia at 3am
by milapede
Summary: The war against Voldemort is long drawn out and the resistance is slowly crumbling. All of Harry's closest friends are dead. The only alternative is to attempt to travel nearly a hundred years into the past and assassinate Tom Riddle before he becomes too powerful. But travelling so far into the past puts too much strain on Harry's mind and he loses most of his memories...


This story is from Tom's perspective.

* * *

It's along the seventh floor corridor, only inches from the hidden entrance to the room I call the room of infinite permutations, that I'm first introduced to the new student. He's pacing up and down the corridor - how would he know the room must be entered by pacing? I think in a panic - and the room, _my _room, which I only discovered because I heard its magic calling out to me and was clever enough to figure out how to open its doors, is a heartbeat away from revealing itself to him. And I can't have that, can I? So I grab him by the shoulder and spin him round.

His wand is aimed at my heart. He's quick, frighteningly quick. I wonder what it'd be like to duel him.

"What the fuck?" he asks, lowering his wand as he realizes I'm a prefect and not an assailant.

"Five points from Gryffindor for gratuitous swearing." I titter out of nervousness, cold, shrill laughter bursting from my throat.

He flinches, and a memory from years and years ago swims up to me - an older boy from the orphanage flinching that way whenever I walked into the room. I'd disemboweled his rabbit to teach him a lesson about bullying. Stuffed the rotting entrails in his shoes a week later to reinforce that lesson.

"You grabbed me out of nowhere in the middle of the night. You're lucky all I did to you was swear at you," the new boy protests.

I bristle at the threat. "Twenty points from Gryffindor for violating curfew."

There's a flash of rebellious anger in his eyes but it passes without him saying anything. He doesn't have to - I've picked up a little magic trick that will make him tell me things without saying a word. _Legilimens_, I mutter under my breath.

"What did you say?" he asks warily, but I'm already inside his head.

I probe gently at first, testing the waters, seeing if he can sense my presence. But his mind is tired, defenceless, and it yields to mine.

At first I search for how much he knows about the room. Nothing, I confirm with relief. To him this is just another corridor. Good. But what an odd coincidence... Who paces along corridors, apart from professors and characters in Shakespearean plays?

Then I start to notice things that pique my interest, make me wish I'd paid more attention when Dippet introduced him at the Start-of-Term feast. I'd laughed with everyone else at the sight of him waiting to be sorted, the sole seventh year standing tall and aloof in a sea of nervous first years, but I'd assumed he was just another transfer student - we'd had a few since Grindelwald invaded Germany. Mostly halfbloods and mudbloods, the ones who'd managed to flee before they were caught and sent to Nurmengard.

I force myself to withdraw from his mind before he realizes I've just committed a transgression far worse than his, one that could get me expelled.

"I said you'd better go to bed. Don't let me catch you out at three in the morning again."

He glares at me, and in the flickering amber light that illuminates Hogwarts at night I notice the semi-circles shadowing his eyes, each like the moon's darker half. But he goes back the way he came without further protest.

I listen to the thud thud thudding of his footsteps as he disappears down the spiral stairway. When silence resumes and all is clear I ask my room of infinite permutations to let me into the library where, like on every other weeknight, I will study the forbidden arts for an hour before bed.

But it's hard to concentrate on things such as legilimency tonight. My studies seem almost too abstract to interest me, and after multiple attempts at reading the same paragraph I push the book aside and call it a night.

There are faces lurking at the periphery of my mind - they seem to have snuck over, unbidden, from his. A boy with red hair and freckles and a very beautiful girl. He doesn't know who they are but he dreams about them almost every night. He loves them like a brother and a sister from a past life. They take turns to die in his dreams, the boy's heart stopped immediately by a flash of green light, the girl bleeding slowly in his arms. Her last words to him always are: "Stop him before he becomes unstoppable," and then he resurfaces from sleep and goes walking around the castle till morning so she doesn't have to die again.


End file.
